more expensive via access fees where, say,Comcast charges all companies to reachtheir customers — or charging for fasterlanes.”Singel says, for example, a digital adprovider would pay for both access andfast lanes for each major ISP so that adauctions happen fast and ad deliveryspeeds stay high.

“For smaller providers, these chargeswill likely start upstream — aimed at thecompanies that help smaller retailers beonline, such as their hosting providersand the hosting provider’s middle-mileconnections,” Singel says. “Long-term,those fees will benefit those who arealready in the position to afford them,namely the biggest companies.” Those large players could afford to payfees to ISPs and that could force smallercompanies and startups to also have topay simply not to be slow, Singel says.

“That’s unlikely to cause a consumer
backlash, but it’s bad for the marketplace
long term. A better strategy long term is
for the industry to fight back against the
fees in a united fashion,” he says.

Consumers’ Concerns

Whether there’s a consumer backlash
or not, Flanagan says she believes an internet without net neutrality could lead
to fewer internet users.

“In cases where the ISPs increase fees
on consumers, it’s likely we’d see a decrease in the total internet population —
and that population would likely be more
affluent and be geographically located in
cities versus rural areas,” she says.

Flanagan cites a study from the Institute for Self-Reliance that says nearly 40
percent of the U.S. population — largely
in rural areas of the country — has access
to only one ISP, limiting the competition
that would generally keep prices down.

Flanagan says it’s possible that marketers could leverage this data to more accurately target and engage with consumers.

“Marketers would need to be cautious— just as they need to be currently withother personalization technologies — sothey don’t irritate consumers,” she says.“Personalization is key to marketing.Delivering the right message to the rightconsumer at the right time tends to drivestrong results. But over-personalization,or using personalization in the wrongcontext, or just straight up getting per-sonalization wrong can be embarrassingFlanagan continues, “Consumers willbe impacted in a number of ways, fromthe removal of internet privacy protec-tions to increased costs for internet accessor poor user experience based on slowerload times for specific sites. Just as withbusinesses, the end of net neutrality willcreate a world of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’with unequal access to information onthe internet — generally divided by geog-raphy and wealth.”Another net neutrality proponent isChetan Saxena, chief operations officerat ISHIR, a consulting firm headquar-tered in Dallas that offers digital market-ing services, among others. He believesan internet without net neutrality couldlead to an ugly — even dystopian — fu-ture where the internet “will becomea weapon in the hands of elites” ratherthan being a tool in the hands of thepeople.

“Without net neutrality, digital mar-keting would be like a beginning of thedepletion of the ecosystem,” Saxena says.“Without neutrality, it [the internet] willsoon turn into something very similar toany large media house in cahoots withelites. And elites can regulate the rateof expansion for a particular site, such asGoogle, a blog, a startup video sharingsite and … make its dependents suffer inSaxena says he sees a future where oli-gopolies “with deep pockets and spendingcapacities could emerge in every industryand niche, bringing a tough time forstartups and the general public at large.This move could further raise the entrybarrier for digital agencies, as a conse-quence of the shrinking of their customer

Silver Linings

Could life sans net neutrality be as
bad a Saxena predicts? Not everyone sees
it that way. Shelly Palmer, CEO of the
Palmer Group, an advisory and creative
services firm in New York, says as something of a silver lining, this regulatory
shift could open up a wide-range of opportunities for agencies, advertisers, and
marketers.